CLASSIC MAC GAME THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS LANDS ON IPHONE
If you’re not a dedicated Mac fiend it may not ring a bell, but Through the Looking Glass holds a distinct honor in Apple’s history.
Folklore.org tells the history in better detail than I will here, but the gist is this: what started as a side-project demo created by Steve Capps on the company’s ill-fated Lisa (Capps would soon leave the Lisa team for the Mac and contribute to the first version of the Finder) became Apple’s only first-party developed and published game.
(Side note: true to the company’s values, it came as gorgeously packaged as any Apple product you might buy today, in a mock cloth-bound-storybook-like case.)
While it never quite got its due on its original platform, history has now wrapped around on itself, as Capps himself has brought the game to the iPhone as AliceX [iTunes link].
The game plays essentially like an arcade version of chess: Alice takes on the movement properties of particular pieces and hops around the board attempting to capture a full slate of CPU-controlled opposing pieces that advance toward you in real time. The iPhone version can be played at its original four different speeds and, on very quick trial, has adapted itself perfectly to the touchscreen.
Even curiouser, AliceX comes with new game skins including a reworked board of hip-hop pieces and — true, I suppose, to the anarcho-cynicalist roots of a game which included a hidden Dead Kennedys logo on its cover — a ‘Bush Memorial’ skin which turns the chess pieces into jester/pope/jockey-hatted Bush administration officials and color-coded Homeland Security alerts being taken out by a clip-art Obama.
Find out more about the game and play a lite Javascript version via Capps’ official AliceX home, and follow future developments by reading the Fake Steve Capps blog.
AliceX — The original Macintosh game now for iPhone [Onedoto, iTunes link]
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